Review Summary: Dude... I can hear colours!
Bands such as Sleep, Kyuss and Orange Goblin have defined the stoner rock genre through a mist circling riffs, gruff vocals and looming bass lines. Some bands like Electric Wizard incorporate a doom feel to their songs that represent an actual drugged experience whereby the rhythm escalates and evolves to a climax within the song. Others may keep to the traditional southern sounding, whiskey chugging churn of hooks such as High On Fire and Down. Newcastle’s Bong however, are on a different trip.
The fitting title of Bong’s seventh album is their approach of recreating the genre. A creation of this album’s sound is, as they explain, “so utterly stoned and repetitive to be a million miles away from the usual definition.” Even the album artwork, by Polish gothic artist Zdzisław Beksiński, is unlike a typical stoner rock trend. Bright colours with lots of expression have been replaced with a hallway of huge mushroom-headed bones leading to a dark mountain. It still looks like something you might see if you’re high but it’s definitely the more daunting side of drug effects.
The two tracks that compose Stoner Rock are an average of about thirty four minutes, that coupled with the album title and band title spells out exactly what you’re going to get from this experience. It’s hard to determine what good drone music actually is due to the minimalistic approach and patterned soundscapes; someone who can’t appreciate the depth drone has just hears endless noise but there’s more than just a load of reverberation to Bong.
Polaris starts immediately with a twang of the guitars that follow throughout the 35 minutes. The length of the one chord characterizes the heavy breathing of inhaling and exhaling while the dreary feedback almost sends you in a semi-comatose state. This is the sort of depth that drone goes into-within minutes you already feel like you’re on a soothing high and the only aspects of the song that stop you from nodding off completely are the commanding vocals of Dave Terry and shiver of drums every now and then. Listen closely and you can tell that this isn’t just 1 exact chord repeated over. Notes can be ‘faster’, some are more strained and others are struck harder. It sounds alive-brooding and overpowering.
Somewhere in another dimension, Out Of The Aeons reaches out to you. If Polaris was a heavy sigh than this track is a heavier heartbeat. You could say that this is a more experimental track. The grave bass contradict the consistent twinkling of what sounds like an Indian string instrument charm you out of your deep sleep and into a more tunnelling, hypnotic escape. The musical artistry is immense. Bong unveil images you could not envision, feelings you didn’t know you could sense and send your consciousness to places that don’t exist outside the brain; all of this through a constant roll of one chord. The oblique drum fills and narrative passage help the overall structure and endurance of the song that guide the guitars through a haze of exhausted energy.
I’ll have whatever these guys have are having.
